


At the Head-waters of the Eternities (The Crossing the Styx Remix)

by SathInflection



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Afterlife, Blood, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-06-26 03:23:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15654768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SathInflection/pseuds/SathInflection
Summary: The boatman goes on one final journey.





	At the Head-waters of the Eternities (The Crossing the Styx Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Water and Whalesong](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12339513) by [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/pseuds/kay_obsessive). 



Samuel wanders. He hasn’t seen the boy with black eyes again since he arrived, but he feels his gaze—perhaps. It would be worse if Samuel were truly alone, invisible to the one being who might be like him.

The Void is empty of ghosts, except for him. Samuel keeps moving, climbing up and down the strange geometries. Some of the not-stone is slick, as if whale oil had leaked from the leviathans who sing and swim above him. He slips on a rock, catching himself on the railing of a ship.

For the first time in years, he smells the open sea. The sails of the whaling ship loom above him, the wood creaking as if the ship were listing in the water.  

But the ship is motionless. Samuel watches his younger self frozen in the act of firing a harpoon at a leviathan. He had forgotten that exact moment—when he had led the slaughter—but not the reek of the whale’s blood spilling beside him, a few spatters of it striking his face like mist. 

Only the leviathans in the sky are moving. Samuel takes a gulp of air, as if the whale dying above him has stolen his breath, and finds himself falling off the ship, into the Void.

He’s drowning. There’s real water choking him, salt stinging his eyes as he fights another death. A wave seizes him and throws him up.

The dirt of Wrenhaven’s shore is under his fingers. Looking up, he sees the lights from the Hound Pits Pub dim, and another Samuel leaves the building, carrying something heavy over his shoulder.

It’s the night he poisoned Corvo Attano for the Loyalists. The other Samuel breathes hard as he struggles under Corvo’s weight. Samuel remembers how frightened he was of refusing; he’d thought he was being brave by halving the poison, though Corvo might have died just the same. He watches himself look over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, then puts Corvo in the boat and pushes it into the river’s current. Samuel from the past sits by the river and lights his pipe with shaking fingers.

“You’ll never matter to Dunwall more than you do right now.”

Samuel turns to see the Outsider standing behind him. The boy looks no more interested in Samuel’s fate than he did before.

“Did Corvo Attano put Emily Kaldwin on the throne,” asks the Outsider, “or was it Samuel Beechworth?”

It was a question for a god to ponder. Samuel had just done what he thought was best. “Why’d you trap me here? Is it because I was a whaler?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then have mercy—”

The Outsider disappears into the Void, and the ground with him. Samuel falls again, into freezing water. Will he keep drowning, over and over?

His descent ends on the roof of a slaughterhouse. He scrambles to his feet; the smell of blood is here, and the song of a dying leviathan rises from below him. Samuel carefully climbs down, hurting his knees when he jumps to the ground. Why couldn’t death have taken his aching joints along with everything else?

He glances back up at the roof. A monster is crawling along the shingles, made of long limbs and darkness. Samuel tries to run, but the thing turns its head and leaps down, barreling into Samuel’s chest.

“Samuel!” the monster says with Emily’s voice. Then it _is_ Emily, embracing him. To his surprise, he feels it. “I was told that you’d drowned!”

“I did, your Highness.” 

“Damn it,” she growls.

“But you’re—” Samuel takes her hands in his. “Please tell me you’re still alive.”

“I’m only dreaming.” Emily holds up her hand, taking off her gloves to show the same Mark that Corvo had borne. “Samuel, you have to let me get you out of here.”

“To go where? My body’s at the bottom of the bay.”

Emily furrows her brow. “There’s more for the dead than just the Void. I’ve seen ghosts here before, but none so solid as you. You know you’re dead. Surely we can find a way for you to move on.”

Samuel had seen no hint of a place outside the Void. “How long have I been here, Emily?”

“Months. How long has it felt?”

Only hours. How much time could Samuel lose? Did it even matter, when he was looking at forever?

Emily starts to fade. She tries to hold on to Samuel, but her hands can’t get a grip. Even the dark thing that she becomes can’t stay. Samuel thinks he’ll drown again—it seems to be how he travels—but instead, he’s merely left alone by the slaughterhouse.

He walks. Dunwall is emptier than it was during the rat plague. Perhaps he walks for years. He makes it out the gates, where the Void yawns forward again. A stream of blood flows next to him. There’s so damn much of it; he’s sicker of the blood than the drowning. He eventually finds the source: a pillar of stone, bleeding like a leviathan. 

There’s a spirit watching it. Samuel recognizes his face from the posters around Dunwall, and he only barely resists striking him. 

“Daud?” Samuel asks.  

Daud turns. “I don’t know you.”

“My name’s Samuel Beechworth.”

With a sigh, Daud replies, “Even being dead hasn’t spared me from never having to introduce myself.”

“You killed the Empress.”

“And I helped kill a god.” He inclines his head towards the stone. “No one recognizes me for what I don’t regret.”

_How long has it been this time?_

Samuel thought he’d noticed the Void changing, becoming somehow even less solid, and the whalesong growing quieter. But the bleeding stone…

“You can get out, you know,” Daud says. “The black-eyed bastard was all that kept this place together. There’s probably thousands still lost in here.”

Daud points away from the stone. Samuel sees a crack in the Void, wide enough for a man to pass through. More cracks go spidering off from it, narrow as veins, but Samuel knows they’ll widen, until they take the rest of the Void with them.

The Void’s out of time. Samuel looks back at Daud, who’s content to stay, and watch the Void decay around him.

But Samuel leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks go out to my beta, Gileonnen! Title is a Moby-Dick quote, naturally.


End file.
